Since the memorable day when Mary Rogers spoke so boldly for the child whom she would not have compromised by so much as a breath of gossip, Tom Barton had kept his promise, and guarded the little girl as carefully as if she had been his sister, until she ceased to be a little girl, and he saw her in all the bright loveliness of sixteen, and then Tom went down before her charms, and asked her to quit school, and be his wife, and live with him at the Ridge, and snub Miss Julia Schuyler as she had been snubbed by her. “No, Mr. Barton, I cannot be your wife. No girl would be that, if she loved you ever so much,” Gertie had answered, fearlessly, while Tom blushed painfully, and knew just what she meant, and swore he would reform, and not look so much like a walking beer-barrel. And he did try to reform, and took the pledge, and broke it in three weeks, and had the delirium tremens, and saw all manner of snakes twisting themselves around Gertie Westbrooke, on whom he called piteously in his agony. Then he took the pledge again, and kept it, and gradually the high color left his face, and his figure began to assume a better shape, and his clothes were not so tight, and he came to see me so often that the meddlesome ones in town wondered if old Ettie Armstrong could be foolish enough to think that boy wanted anything of her! “Why, she is forty at least,” good Mrs. Smithers said, averring that she knew, because the day I was born their bees swarmed, and her husband broke his neck trying to saw off the limb where they had settled. Of course such evidence was unanswerable, but as I knew just how old I was, and why Tom Barton visited me so often, I did not care to contradict the story of the bees, and I let Tom Barton come whenever he pleased to talk of his “best girl,” as he called her, and to keep him from the “Golden Eagle,” the low tavern where he had slipped so often. At last, however, Gertie’s education was finished, and she came home to stay, and the colonel welcomed her kindly, and thought how beautiful she was, and felt his blood stir a little when she raised herself on tiptoe and kissed him as a matter of course. Julia never did that and Emma but seldom, while Edith kept most of her kisses now for the two-year-old boy Arthur, so that the cold, reserved man was not much used to kisses of late, and felt the touch of Gertie’s lips for hours, and caught himself contrasting her with Alice Creighton, whom he had last seen so elaborately dressed with powder on her face and every hair seeming to stand on end. But thirty thousand a year covers many defects, and Alice was still the colonel’s ideal of a daughter-in-law when he welcomed Gertie home.